What Amnesty Means For The Country In Practical Terms: 7 Million New Welfare Recipients

The U.S. doesn’t need unskilled labor. The authors trot out “The nation needs energetic young workers to spur the economy and support an ever-increasing social-welfare burden.” Uh, immigrants are around twice as likely as the native-born to be poor and use welfare. Among Hispanic immigrants, who represent the lion’s share of the low-skilled workers the op-ed says we need “to support an ever-increasing social-welfare burden,” the majority are on welfare. This isn’t because they’re lazy spongers – fully one-third of immigrant households with a worker present are on welfare. The problem is that a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy doesn’t need additional low-skilled workers. As Milton Friedman famously said, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Advocates for illegal immigration LOVE to claim that illegals will do jobs “that Americans won’t do.” Of course, that’s not true. A more accurate statement would be, “Because illegals don’t buy health care or car insurance and they cheat on their taxes, they can do the same jobs as law abiding Americans at a lower cost.”

Although we may have a few exceptions, say in the construction industry, most illegals are doing manual labor that doesn’t require an education or any special skills. There’s nothing wrong with that work, but typically, it pays very little and it’s a young man’s game. Put another way, most people who do that sort of work aren’t paying income tax when they’re young and are unable to do it when they’re old because it’s too strenuous.

So, if you’re talking about illegals, you’re talking about people who would take more money out of the system than they’ll ever put into it.

As a nation, why do we want to bring in people to collect welfare, food stamps, end up on disability and generally take more than they give? Yes, that’s not every illegal immigrant, but it is a good description of the majority of illegals and we’re being told we essentially have a choice between “all” or “none.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with any honest job, including picking oranges and strawberries, but as a nation we’d benefit much more from bringing in scientists, engineers, and computer programmers than people who bring nothing of significance to the table other than a willingness to break the law in order to do manual labor at below market labor rates.